The American Wilderness 21 



fifteen years during which this slaughter lasted, a 

 succession of desperate wars was waged with the 

 banded tribes of the Horse Indians. All the time, 

 in unending succession, long trains of big white- 

 topped wagons crept slowly westward across the 

 prairies, marking the steady oncoming of the fron 

 tier settlers. 



By the close of 1883 the last buffalo herd was de 

 stroyed. The beaver were trapped out of all the 

 streams, or their numbers so thinned that it no 

 longer paid to follow them. The last formidable 

 Indian war had been brought to a successful close. 

 The flood of the incoming whites had risen over the 

 land ; tongues of settlement reached from the Mis 

 sissippi to the Rocky Mountains, and from the 

 Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. The frontier had 

 come to an end; it had vanished. With it vanished 

 also the old race of wilderness hunters, the men who 

 spent all their days in the lonely wilds, and who 

 killed game as their sole means of livelihood. Great 

 stretches of wilderness still remained in the Rocky 

 Mountains, and here and there in the plains country, 

 exactly as much smaller tracts of wild land are to 

 be found in the Alleghanies and northern New York 

 and New England; and on these tracts occasional 

 hunters and trappers still linger ; but as a distinctive 

 class, with a peculiar and important position in 

 American life, they no longer exist. 



There were other men besides the professional 



